Christmas's Forum Posts

  • Thanks Ashley it's definitely something I'm considering. I've built most of the game already in Construct 2 and it's fairly complex. How easy would it be to copy a large amount of Events from C2 to C3 (I don't believe I've heavily relied on any 3rd party plugins yet)?

  • Thanks dop2000 I dunno what we'd do without Rex Plugins.

    In regards to your Edit: the full Win64 folder is 141 MB including the NW.EXE.

    Not sure how I can run a debug since the project is so large any browser I've tried crashes on preview.

    These are all seperate cloned sprites with 160 individual animations of one of those bouncing idles everybody does in fighting games. All those animations are duplicates though. Are you saying that Construct's Exporter is smart enough to somehow detect that these images are identical and remove them? Even though they are in different sprite folders?

  • Thanks BadMario those are essential points (& in no way a hijack, these are all useful things to note in regards to this topic).

    So I built a test. I made a copy of the Beat Em Up project I've well underway (which contains a fair few sprites already but only weighs in at around 25MB on disk),then I loaded it with a 18 individual sprites at 200px² each containing a whopping 160 individual animations at 35frames each. That's a ludicrous 100,800 image files. All pre-loaded in the first layout (I've not used the MM-Preloader plugin yet).

    So on disk this is a huge 6½GB. Construct takes about 2 minutes to save/autosave the project each time, & on top of that all browsers I've tried just crap themselves & crash when I try to run a preview.

    However when I export it, after brute compression, the NW.EXE for windows only weighs in at 94MB. The game loads almost instantly & runs fine. I even put in a test key to spawn different character sprites again & again. I had like 30 of these massive bastards on the screen all playing a looping animation & the game seemed to run with no problems.

    I figured my PC was just powerful enough to chew it up & spit it out, so I tried it on my crusty 10 year old iMac. Even though the OSX export was twice the size at 196MB, Steve Jobs old paperweight still loaded the game almost instantly & run it with no problems, even with a butt-load of sprites getting spawned onto the screen.

    Finally I tried it on this crappy old tablet I found. I have bricks in my back yard that have more processing power than this thing. I ran the 32bit windows EXE on it & even though it was a little slow it still run ok, if not great.

    So the real problem here wouldn't be exporting & distributing the game it would actually just be working on it, as Construct will not preview a project of this size. I guess if I just build it gradually, piece by piece, this isn't going to be a huge problem? Any ideas for improving the creation process are welcome.

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  • Thanks dop2000 that's exactly the kind of stuff I'm looking for. That Pre-Loader was what I was thinking about, just couldn't for the life of me remember what it was.

    I looked into Q3D a couple of years back newt, when I first thought about using 3D models rendered as 2D sprites. I thought it would cut out the middleman so to speak but I just found it impossible to use and very hard to find good tutorials or documentation for. I'm not sure it's a good fit for a Beat Em Up style game but if anyone knows any good guides for Q3D I would be willing to look at it again.

  • Thanks dop2000. It'll take a lot of work to export and edit all the sprite sheets but what I'll do is duplicate the few animations I already have ready a ridiculous amount of times, as many times as the finished product will need, and then see how the layout loads.

    I'm hoping to have at least 4 characters on screen (more if possible) as it's more of a Beat Em Up/Arena Fighter like a wrestling game than a one on one Fighter (I have quite a cool AI pattern that makes multiple enemies circle and attack you like in Streets of Rage).

    Sure I heard of something a while ago that was a plugin that uploaded images from a webspace when needed? If anyone has any suggestions or solutions for something like that I would love to hear it.

  • I'm considering trying video for the backgrounds thanks newt, wouldn't really work for the character sprite animations unless the backgrounds were a static colour. It might work if Construct 2 can read .mov files which can be exported with an alpha channel for transparent backgrounds.

    Afraid I'm not in a position to spend months to years learning Unity or other 3D game engines as I've invested far too much time building a complex Beat Em Up system for Construct 2. I'm way too invested in this to quit now.

    Still looking for suggestions, links to plugins, or any hints on how to optimise excessive amounts of image files for animation in Construct 2.

  • Thank you AllanR I have used spriter in the past and it is fantastic software. It's definitly something I will use if I do end up going the pixel art route as I have the Spriter plugin for Construct 2.

    I am looking for solutions on how to use my 3D models rendered into 2D sprites because I can use Mo-cap to animate them which is a huge time saver for me and also I have put a lot of work into making these models.

    I am particularly looking for solutions, hints and tips, on how to get extremely large amounts of image files into Construct without having serious performance hits. I know it's a big ask but it's something I really want to do.

  • Thanks for the suggestion but that's not really something I'm considering as it's a Beat Em Up/Fighting Game with multiple selectable characters. It wouldn't really fit into an episodic format.

    My other option at the moment is to visually replicate an old system like the Gameboy or ZX Spectrum using good old pixel art as I'm not too shabby. I can't forsee any real problems building that in C2 but my heart isn't in it.

    I kinda feel like the 3D rendered voxel characters with mo-cap movement may be a bit more marketable, so I'm asking the question about how to get as many image files in as possible in order to make that happen in Construct 2. Just doesn't seem realistic or doable but hopefully somebody knows some hints or possible plugins that may make it work?

  • So sorry if I appear dense newt I'm not sure if I follow you? This is a commercial project with plans for digital distribution for PC. Not sure how else I'd distribute a project of this scale?

  • Thank you newt. Not entirely sure I follow. How would multiple exports work? Also not sure how I'd figure out how much ram I'd target (is as little as humanly possible an option?). If I do a rough sum of how much all the animation sequences would add up to together it's something crazy like 10GB (they're about 800kb each but that's before compression).

    Apologies, I'm not the most technically minded C2 user, I'm primarily a graphics/animation guy.

  • Hi all. I was just looking for some advice on using very large amounts of animation files as I know Construct 2 isn't particularly optimised for it.

    I'm working with 3D sprites rendered as 2D png image sequences(they're big chunky sprites as it's a fighting game) each roughly around 200px² in size then converted into sprite sheets (many, many sprite sheets as they're very fluidly animated through motion capture). Probably around 30 individual character sprites with around 30/40 fighting moves each and the animation length for each move being between 20 and 100 frames. Example https://66.media.tumblr.com/f6015d4ecbf09f182cae5da82e094c08/tumblr_psk0pcrcAi1ryvddto1_250.gif

    So we're looking at easily 100,000+ individual image files at around 200px² each. I know this is absurd and obviously isn't going to work but I was wondering if anyone knew any hints, tips or plugins for getting even close to this many sprite images into a C2 game somehow?

    All help appreciated thanks in advance.

  • Ah yeah. I seem to remember you and mekonbekon had some great examples of something along those lines here... https://www.scirra.com/forum/spawn-particles-on-the-point-2-object-collide_t82382?start=30

    I reckon that's a good way to go, but maybe a bit outside my skillset (I only have so much hair left to pull out). I think I may have a less sophisticated solution.

    I can go through every event that progresses the animation, and then set the size of the base object so it changes depending on the angle. Like dis...

    Its not elegant or quick but it should do the business.

  • Hi all, Hope everyone had a great holiday season

    I have a sprite object that has a collision box that changes depending on it's frame of animation. (It appears to rotate 360° at a 3D angle even though the sprite stays static, therefore it's collision box changes dimensions every frame)

    There is a base object that this animated sprite is pinned to. It's a rectangular physics object. That's our main object, and this car sprite simply changes animation frames to match the angle that this base physics object is moving in (for example if the physics object is moving at 90° then the animation frame of this sprite is set to 18 etc)

    I thought I was being real clever with this but perhaps not. I guess this is what you get when you try to fake 3D? Obviously the base physics objects rectangle would have to have slightly different dimensions depending on the angle we're moving in order to match it's accompanying animations.

    What I need to do is change the size of the base physics object so that it always matches the size of the animated sprite's collision zone. Would anyone have any idea how I could do this, that's if it's possible at all?

    Apologies if this isn't very clear. I am aware that this is a bit of an unconventional apporach to faux 3D.

  • Hard to say — Maybe provide a capx example to better explain what you want

    But from what I can gather, you want to use the Is Between Angles, or Is Within Angles conditions. Then go to the Game Over Layout

    Or simply try using Turret Behavior https://www.scirra.com/manual/152/turret, it's pretty cool

  • Aye BigZig11, like OddConfection says, set the the angle to 180°

    Alternatively, set the bullet speed to minus (eg: -400) and it will travel backwards, which is also useful